Walking to the Grocery Store in the Suburbs

The houses become more and more monochromatic as I walk east. The suburbs of Cary, North Carolina I am familiar with are an ever expanding complex of gray and white houses, that then yield gray and white housing projects, which then become those gray and white projects that are still in construction. Yet the natural progression from the cluster of houses to projects described here assumes a point of view: that of a car owner. If one is a pedestrian, those clusters feel more like islands, than an intricate network. As the sidewalks face a dead end, the pedestrians also lose their mobility. Without vehicles, they are trapped in their particular neighborhoods, simple in both their looks and function.

Some places ought not to be walked. There are sidewalks, but their dead ends in the face of a four-lane road with an ever flowing stream of cars signal something crucial to those using the sidewalks. “You ought not go any further!” Add to this the fact that one is most likely the only pedestrian having to gauge the movements of forty different cars and their drivers and passengers, and there not only lies an implicit message about a lack of mobility but also a kind of social standing and autonomy. One feels a kind of self-conscious embarrassment, walking beside roads without sidewalks or roads with sidewalks that are rarely used by anyone. If life in cars is the “water” for most of the suburban fish (to borrow David Foster Wallace’s analogy), life on feet reveals the exact dimension, limitations, assumptions, and failures of that water. 

Textbooks on US history locate a revolution in the 1950s: the GI bill and the creation of the white-patriarchical-nuclear-family suburbs. They say that the prevalence of cars played an important role in the widespread emergence of such creations (as well as the creation of the particular cultural image of suburbs). Vehicles and suburbs are historically and conceptually intertwined. One is not possible without the other.

Yet why does it seem to me that the experience of living in an American suburb boils down not to one’s daily life in the car but to that moment of intense self-consciousness and alienation when one waits on the dilapidated sidewalk to cross the road at a four-laned intersection, notices the green light, and runs across that road and all the forty or so vehicles waiting for their green light so that they can zoom by 60 mph. The futile and embarrassed pedestrian defines the essence of life in the suburbs, because their desire to traverse roads beyond their little pocket of gray and white houses represents everything the suburbs are not intended for. It is something not only implicitly but actively blocked by their very design. Pedestrians realize what the water is, its viscosity, composition, and murkiness.